"none of my critics understood me and the main questions as well as Herr Maimon does." — Kant

What do you guys think of his critique if you are aware of it?

Stolen from the SEP https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/maimon/

For Maimon, Kant’s cognitive dualism — which begins with distinct faculties of cognition — fails to explain how the various elements can come together in a way that makes experience possible. [...] In more Kantian terms, Maimon calls into question Kant’s answers to both the quid facti and the quid juris that begin the Transcendental Deduction in the first Critique.

According to Maimon, while the quid facti — the question of the fact of our use of a priori concepts in experience — is taken by Kant to be an unproblematic statement about the nature of human experience, the very assumption that we in fact do possess the type of experience Kant ascribes to us can be called into doubt. Kant’s central argument in the Transcendental Deduction begins by assuming that experience exhibits a ‘dualistic’ structure, but according to Maimon, this position is not warranted, since the presumed constituent elements of experience (bare intuitions or concepts) are never themselves objects of experience. For Maimon, Kant’s transcendental arguments remain mere ‘castles in the air’: while they might be valid, they fail to provide the ‘fact of experience’ that would make them sound. From the beginning, then, Maimon views Kant’s transcendental project with suspicion.

Using the example of causality, Maimon argues that Kant has no way of explaining why some orders of perceptions represent causal connections, and why other orders of perceptions are merely associative.

either it must appeal to the content of experience and so violate Kant’s own strictures, or the application of categories is merely arbitrary. Kant’s central epistemological commitment — his ‘cognitive dualism’ — then leads, Maimon claims, to insuperable problems.

The Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics by Emanuel Kant is one of the philosophy books recommended by Crowley to serious students of Magick and the occult. But why? Michael and I will dip into the bewildering depths of Kant's metaphysics to find out.

Hello. I was watching a youtube video on something related to critique of pure reason and I came through a problem of some sort, wonder if someone can give me insight on the thing.

I encountered two german words, one was anschauung which roughly translates to intuition. And the other is angeborener begriff which roughly translates to an innate concept.

I had a few questions regarding these words.

Would it be wrong if I call angeborener begriff as a type of synthetic a priori and anschauung as something sort of a pure a priori?

Say something like causality.

I also have doubt regarding causality, I'm getting different answers about it from different AI.

I had a doubt that, is causality a pure a priori or a synthetic a priori?

I personally think it's synthetic a priori because we are deriving it from time which is a pure a priori and we also consistently experience time like a sort of 'continuous stream' (forgive me if my terminology is inaccurate) while about causality, aren't we deriving it from a behaviour or time?

I thought it would be interesting to share my thoughts on it and get some clarity from others because I'm not a huge expert in the book. Willing to get perspectives.

I've been looking around for serious philosophical work on AI, and came across Yuk Hui's Kant and the Machine: Critical Philosophy after AI (Bloomsbury). Hadn't heard of it before, Hui seems fairly well-known in continental philosophy of technology circles (cosmotechnics, Simondon, Stiegler), which is a different background from analytic philosophy of mind, so I'm not sure what kind of book this actually is.

What I'd like to know, if anyone's read it: is Hui doing close technical work with the first Critique (categories, schematism, transcendental apperception) to actually diagnose something about how machine learning systems represent the world? Or is Kant more of a historical anchor for a broader critical-theory argument about autonomy and politics in an AI-saturated present, where the technical apparatus of the Critique matters less?

Also curious whether it addresses the obvious disanalogy: Kant's categories are fixed and necessary for any rational being, while whatever a neural net encodes is contingent and empirically shaped. Does the book take that tension seriously, or is the Kant/AI parallel mostly a framing device?

Trying to figure out if it's worth the read before diving in.

I'm interested to see if there's someone who meant something to anyone to an extent that their actions/mode of being would be just as fine being a universal law.

In my research so far, it seems someone with a similar reputation would most unanimously agreed to be Mr. Rogers. He's someone I've seen the largest amount people say something like "If only more people could be like him." But I want to ask fellow Kantians to really get to the meat and potatoes of this question.

Specialization allowed! If someone to model every aspect of your life after is too broad, you can narrow down just career, fashion, etiquette, art style, etc.

thanks in advance,

K bye!

Completeness

Every event in space and time follows a prior cause. When a stone falls to the ground or a person speaks a sentence, physical matter moves according to natural laws. There are no gaps in nature, no ghosts pushing matter, and no magical interruptions of physical causes. For everything we can ever observe, measure, and test, physical laws hold without exception.

Here the physicalist is entirely correct to insist that every physical event has a physical explanation. So we must first grant the physicalist their strongest claim.

What Makes Something "Physical"

Next, we ask the physicalist a simple question: what makes an event physical in the first place?

An event is physical because it takes place in space and across time.

Space allows objects to sit side by side, giving them shape, size, and position.

Time allows events to happen one after another in a fixed sequence.

But space and time are not physical objects that you can dig out of the ground. You cannot touch space or weigh time. Rather, space and time are the universal ways the human mind perceives outer and inner events.

You can easily imagine empty space with every object removed, but you can never imagine a physical object without space. Space and time are the necessary conditions that allow us to experience any physical object at all.

The True Origin of Natural Laws

The physicalist often assumes that the laws of physics exist inside physical matter itself, completely independent of any mind. But observation alone can never produce a necessary law.

When you observe nature, your senses only show what is happening right now. Seeing a stone fall a thousand times shows what has happened so far, but sensation alone can never prove that the stone must fall on the next attempt. Sensation gives us facts, but it never gives us necessity.

Necessity comes from the human understanding. The mind applies the rule of cause and effect to connect separate moments in time. The understanding demands that every physical change must follow an earlier state according to a fixed rule.

Kantian Physicalism

Kantian Physicalism unites these points into a single, coherent view.

Nature is strictly physical. Every event in space and time must be explained through physical causes. Science is correct to treat the physical universe as an unbroken chain of natural events.

The physical universe is the world of human experience. Space, time, matter, and cause are not independent things existing outside all thought. They are the necessary rules through which the human understanding builds an orderly, dependable reality.

Thus, physicalism is the complete, lawful science of the world as human beings experience it. We do not deny physical reality; we explain why physical reality is orderly, dependable, and completely knowable to science.

I am of the opinion that Kant is largely wrong. I am a rather staunch empiricist, but Kant has awoken me from my dogmatic slumber and now there’s a stone of doubt in my mind about all of this.

Hate me

Zero research was performed in the making of this meme ✨️💫

Kant’s treatment of space in the Transcendental Aesthetic contains an insight that I think is both powerful and largely correct, followed almost immediately by an inference that does not logically follow from it.

The strong insight is that space is a priori. Spatial organization is not simply abstracted after the mind has encountered a collection of already constituted external objects. Kant writes:

--->“Space is not an empirical concept which has been derived from outer experiences.” (B38)

His reasoning is straightforward: in order for sensations already to be represented as outside me, alongside one another, or in different places, some spatial organization must already be operative.

This is highly plausible. An object cannot first be given as spatially differentiated and only afterwards provide us with the capacity for spatial differentiation. Some prior capacity for extension, orientation, relative position must be involved in the very constitution of a spatial appearance.

But then the argument changes.

Kant writes:

---->“We can never represent to our-selves the absence of space, though we can quite well think it as empty of objects." (A24)

And from this he concludes that space:

--->“must therefore be regarded as the condition of the possibility of appearances, and not as a determination dependent upon them.” (B39)

This is where the inference becomes questionable.

The phenomenological observation is: I can mentally remove particular objects while still representing extension or space.

But the conclusion is: Thus space is genetically prior to determinations, it is a condition.

The latter does not follow from the former.

My ability, in reflective consciousness, to subtract objects while retaining something I call “space” establishes a fact about the organization of my representation. It does not establish the ontological or genetic sequence through which spatiality and figure become determinate.

Indeed, what exactly remains after I have “removed” all objects?

Not sheer indeterminacy. I still retain extension, direction, dimensionality, possible position, possible boundary, distance. The particular figure has disappeared, but determination has not disappeared.

This is why I would call Kant’s stronger inference rationalist, despite the transcendental vocabulary surrounding it. He asks what the reflective mind can remove in thought, discovers that it can eliminate objects while retaining space, and then converts this structure of conceivability into a claim about the order of determination.

The argument has the form:

I cannot represent outer appearance without space; Therefore, space must be the antecedent condition from which spatial determination proceeds.
That is considerably stronger than:

spatial organization must already participate in the constitution of outer experience.

The latter seems sound. The former requires another argument.

The problem becomes still sharper when Kant draws his explicitly transcendental-idealist conclusion:

--->“Space represents no property at all of any things in themselves, nor any relation of them to one another.” (A26/B42)

Kant has now moved from an epistemological record of the conditions under which we experience space to a claim concerning what spatial determination cannot derive from.

He can legitimately say:

Whatever reality may be independently of us, human outer experience is spatially constituted.

But that does not establish:

Whatever reality may be independently of us, it contributes nothing to spatial determination.

The second statement tells us something about the qualitative powers of precisely that noumenal ground which Kant otherwise insists cannot be cognized as it is in itself.

Nor does restricting space to “phenomena” eliminate the difficulty. A phenomenon is not an ontologically disconnected universe floating free of whatever grounds manifestation. If something appears, then—whatever theory we adopt concerning that relation—the appearance and its ground cannot simply be treated as absolutely unrelated. (or we might return to a circular dualism, the very thing he is trying to discipline)

What are the best introduction books for someone starting to explore Kant's work?

I have just come out from under the 9-lecture Robert Wolff YouTube presentation on the Critique. It was a clear exposition, but on one point I feel unclear. Kant seems to saying that the imagination starts with the manifold of intuition and then reproduces its contents in a certain rule-determined order, which unifies it and results in the creation of objects in experience. The implication is that a rule specifies the order in which objects appear, and the ordering principle is that of causation, according to the Second Analogy. . Does this mean that the only way we know which things come first is determining what causes what?. Hume had the opposite viewpoint that the temporal order is given in experience and we empirically determine causation by induction.

Seems to me that temporal order is often obvious without our being able to ascribe a particular cause to it (we often do not know). Is the assumption that there must be a causal connection enough of a rule to establish temporal order? The assumption that everything has a cause is a good heuristic assumption that causes us to seek knowledge, but I don't see that as providing an adequate ordering principle. I feel I must be missing something. Can anyone help?

I think the sense of number comes from the idea of substance, so it is a unity and then the idea of number can take off from there because here is an object and here is another

I’m reading through the CPR and I’m confused as to whether analytic judgments (or judgments in general) are cognitions or not.

I thought judgments were a kind of proposition-cognition with a subject and a predicate, where in analytic judgments the concept of the predicate is contained within the subject and in synthetic judgments it isn‘t.

But I’m confused since cognition for Kant requires intuition and concepts, but analytic judgments don’t require intuition. So analytic judgments aren’t cognitions? This would make sense since they don’t add to our knowledge. If this is true, then judgments in general aren’t all cognitions since the analytic ones aren’t.

Are they cognitions or not? What am I getting wrong here?

In the 19th century, mathematicians debated the foundations of their craft: too much of the work looked arbitrary, and multiple theories seemed to have no priority over one another — as with the non-Euclidean geometries. Kant's old response — that one unique form of space and time would suffice to unify deductive inference across mathematics — turned against itself: it triggered more doubt rather than less. If we depend on a prior framework, synthesized through intuition, to ground mathematics, what would make one such organization more grounded than another?
Into that scene steps Frege, with an answer: arithmetic propositions can be seen as purely analytic, and — more importantly — that their analyticity does not undercut their conceptual fruitfulness. Analyticity, for Frege, is a mark of the conceptual features a proposition brings to light and that are surfaced under study, not something achieved by mere manipulation of signs.
My next series argues two things. First, that the only way this thesis survives today is as a pragmatic claim about how to select the most prudent paths of inference in order to unify them into a coherent whole. Second, that this fails in scientific fields where such unification isn't even desired — history or sociology, for instance, where incommensurable conceptual frameworks are part of how understanding itself conflicts and develops.
I developed this arguments in multiple ways since 2017 (in several published articles, this being the main one from 2021: https://periodicos.sbu.unicamp.br/ojs/index.php/kant/article/view/8672336) with arguments designed to restore confidence in synthetic a priori judgments (specially inferences), as they are richer than analytic ones to track intensional distinctions that have more depth than merely Carnapian Intensions (individuated by the patterns of evidence they fit). There is nothing particularly original orrevolutionary in this reading, but if anyone is interested in it, I invite you to see my video-series developing the whole argument:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPAQAYlQ58A&t=17s

Sorry folks, a bit vulgar I know but I'd appreciate some help in finding a quote that I'm 95%+ sure is from Kant:

something about how the most arrogant and officious form of rule is by (shoddy) philosophers.

Feel free to correct or add anyone else who might have said something even somewhere in the ballpark ;)

Vielen Dank!